 So I'm welcome everybody here to the Martinis Segal Theatre Center at the Graduate Center CUNY. My name is Frank Henschka and I do run the Segal Theatre Center. It's the very end of the semester, it's the end of the year, it's our very last program. Students are already gone, are already out and New York City has switched into the busy holiday mode, but we feel we always start with something important and significant and we always end with something important and significant, not only for spring and fall, but also for the year. And we thought that our focus, which we have today, building audiences for contemporary circus, especially also in New York, is something that we have to focus on, that we should think about, that should be on our radar and not under the radar. And I'm a strong supporter of this work which is exciting, it's looking forward, it's theater populaire, it's real public theater in a way, it has many, many answers I think for questions that theater and performance poses us, who does it, for whom, where and why. I think the body is involved, it's embodied, but also that new wave of circus that came perhaps a bit more from France, but also from around the world, it's a global movement and we are thrilled and excited to be in a little, our little way part of it. And we support things that are emerging, and we do things that are not yet always fully emerged when we talked on Monday with Chad, he said, maybe this is a little bit a moment like when the New York avant-garde started in the 70s and 80s, it was not really known. So we do things nobody else does, at least at universities or others, and we take a stand and we really do say this is something seriously important, it's a future of the performing arts and in the 21st century and 22nd century, this will be a focus, I think, for audiences alike, and it really covers young adult children, theater, family entertainment, but also especially now with these new developments that as we wrote in our invitations for everybody to watch, and it is no longer the good old circus like we saw this afternoon with the historic documentary, something has radically changed, and of course we think, what the better, we have with us presenters, presenters who have decades long, often experience of presenting work, of presenting circus, contemporary circus, and actually very successfully in a time where audience members in our traditional theaters are atwindling, we do know that they're up down to 50 percent in some audiences, the big theaters are down to four or five productions a year or have even halted this fall, New York City has seen how dramatic this is, and someone said the analog theaters having a hard time, so that's what they say in the digital world I'm playing in games, but I think this is something really exciting, something really important, and I would like to thank Hal Round as always for being such a great host for our panels, which are live stream panels, and I welcome our audience here in the Segal Center, and I would like to hand it over to Ruth Wickler, who has been a champion early on, I think nationally, but also globally, for what's called Nouveau Cirque, contemporary circus, and so I can't wait to hear more, and Ruth I hand it over to you, so thank you all for coming. Thank you so much, Frank, and thank you for shedding light on this discipline, in this hallowed halls of the Graduate Center, it's exciting. So my name is Ruth Wickler, and for the last five years I've been directing the International Market for Contemporary Circus in Montreal, I'm now on the West Coast working at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington, but I'm going to speak on behalf of this experience with the circus market. So we have a wonderful panel, thank you each of you for coming and being part of this. Lori Jones from the Quick Center, Jed Wheeler, Lindsay Biliomacchio, and Xavier Gobain, thank you so much for being part of this, and a couple of folks who have submitted materials also online to share. The focus really is on this angle of building audiences, so that's why we have more presenter voice, because in some ways the work of a presenter is about doing that matchmaking between artists and audiences, knowing audiences, knowing artists, and kind of weaving that connection, and it is a project of many years to build audiences for this art form. So I'm going to give a little introduction, and then also share some of the contributions from colleagues who are not here in person. So I invite my fellow panelists to turn around. So this is an image from last summer in Montreal we presented at the Tohu a show called The Pulse, which had 72 folks on tour. It was a mammoth large-scale contemporary work by Gravity and other myths of Australia, working with the Girls Choir of Catalonia. Quite a, I think that will go in the history books of large-scale endeavors in this art form. So just a kind of little context to frame things, skipping to the very bottom point, the U.S. has an amazing strong tradition of traditional circus, and that is both a help and a hindrance for developing audiences for contemporary circus. This is also true in other countries, other regions that also don't have large government support for the arts, and for contemporary arts and new creations. So Latin America, Africa, and the U.S., you know, maybe they have amazing, you know, in thousands of years, hundreds of years, traditions of circus, acrobatics, all kinds of art forms that are related to object manipulation and visual theater, virtuosity, et cetera, but in an absence of government support for creation of new contemporary expressions, there's a challenge in, you know, new companies making new work and sustaining that. It's just difficult, and that's true in every art form, but it's also especially true in circus. So again, American mass entertainment is circus from the 19th century on. It's kind of at the very heart of our culture in America, so that's something we can certainly be proud of. I think P.T. Barnum, you know, invented American marketing and spectacle, and so the circus really is at the very, very heart of American culture, I would say. Cirque du Soleil, which is, of course, based in Montreal, has taken a very prominent place in American mass culture and made, ensured that live entertainment remains part of mass commercial culture even as, you know, film and TV occupy that space in so many other ways, but Cirque du Soleil keeps circus, you know, as a viable commercial part of commercial mass culture. When we talk about contemporary circus, though, I don't think we're really talking about commercial mass culture, so just to differentiate those in terms of semantics. And then a lot of times when you hear about contemporary circus, we're going back to kind of a root period of the transition from circus being an art form that only was developed by and performed by circus families. Amazing. Thank you so much for coming. She flew in from Saudi Arabia yesterday. Okay. And anyway, moving it from, you know, you would only perform circus if you were born into a circus family to you can be, want to be a circus artist. And in order to do that, you can go to school and become one. So that kind of major shift that really started in France in the 70s. And then, but of course, who's teaching in those schools? A lot of Soviet heritage, a lot of Chinese heritage. And so there's a lot of through lines going through to what people are learning in the circus schools. But then the government art support, the legitimization of circus as an art form among other noble arts is kind of a key part of circus evolution into contemporary circus. And that the absence of that in the US is kind of, again, like I said, a bit of a marking point of our story. And then when we talk about the work that we're going to talk about in this panel, I think a lot of it falls into the category of contemporary circus as a nonprofit touring performing art. So it's kind of a, if the circuits are less tense and self producing and more festivals and venues, if the place of exchange is less competitions and more art markets, that those are kind of the differentiation of what we're talking about. But circus itself, it still maintains a very vibrant commercial arm. It's still, you know, circuit circulates intense. So it is many, many things. It also has, you know, children's parties and all the rest of it. So there are many, many versions of this. And we're kind of speaking about one particular type. And I think we'll call it contemporary circus for what it's worth. So I just did a little rundown. I mean, everyone in this group kind of knows this history, but I did a little inventory on the left hand side of circus in New York City and how it has important marking points, I would say. One thing I will say is that Tohu was built in 2004. So it's just having its 20th anniversary this coming year. And what Tohu, with its extraordinary amount of subsidy from the Quebec government, was able to do one-off presentations of international large-scale circus works in a way that regularly throughout the year and every summer. And that's just a kind of scale of working that is without parallel. Yeah. So like, you know, in New York City, BAM, the New Victoria and Lincoln Center Festival have been presenting international large-scale circus works decades ago. Many companies have grown up here and become established. Many of them have found their local presenters and homes. One thing to mention is that the EU supported a project that was Tohu and then Circus Trotto, which is the European Network of Circus Arts that aimed to kind of develop a cohort of American presenters that would learn about circus and develop some fluency. And much of the circus that was presented, the international circus that was presented in the last couple decades, had its root in that presenter education work. It ended in 2015. So I think maybe it started in 2009, does that ring a bell? Okay. And so moving right forward to recent years, during the pandemic, you know, where I come in is that I had to assume the direction of the International Market for Caterpillar Circus, which is part of Tohu in Montreal in 2019, so that when the pandemic hit, it was kind of a key moment that both brought circus to its knees because as a touring art form with high dependence on international flow and bringing people together, it was very hobbling. And yet it also opened up possibilities because anyone could join a Zoom. So in fact, we were well positioned with the MEC to really open the doors to anyone and everyone who might want to participate in a building of network for circus, and particularly presenting circus and also brought together colleagues in our field of presenting to be in working groups that met regularly. And so these relationships that had been once a year became ongoing and they turned into friendships and trust relationships and a lot, a lot, a lot of results have come out of this, which I'll show you in a second. And anyway, so Laurie is chair of our U.S. group and Jed is chair of our commission group and yeah. Okay. And a big, I want to also call out Mark and your work on the American Circus Alliance, which was also part of the pandemic. So, you know, these are all really important evolutions, I think, of the sector. And I just wanted to shine one little light myself on the pitch sessions. So when we were doing the market online, the first pitch sessions we did online increased the number of countries participating by dramatically. And what I'm going to show you is I made some scrolling marks around the works that have been touring and even making North American Dubuze since, as fruits of these pitch sessions. So as you can see, there's this weekend in New York City, white gold represented here on this panel that pitched in 2021, virtually, and the Madagascar Clowns Zola Bay are also in New York City this weekend at Lincoln Center. And they pitched that for the first time at that pitch session as well. And I put a little check mark behind every other works that I know, toured in North America since then. And I'm sure I'm missing some as well. These are just the ones that I know. Am I missing? And then this is the next one. You can see all the check marks. So this is, you know, not every work that is submitted is selected. I think that we have had a jury, you know, jury around eight jurists from around North America and around the world who whittled down the applications by about, they'll pick like about a 50%. And, but still, and that work of collective selection does a really important job of identifying what work will tour in North America well to the U.S. audience and the Canadian audience. And so having so many check, these are all works that have subsequently toured. And I think I'm missing some as well, but it's pretty amazing, actually. Because the number of companies that were touring prior, you know, there were some greatest hits, but it wasn't very many. And certainly the diversity of art artistically has dramatically increased and the diversity of global representation has dramatically increased. And this is last summer. So you have Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, South Africa. Finally, we got Japan and Korea for the first time last year because of some, I went, yeah, I went to those places, Taiwan. So anyway, this has been quite a dramatic change very, very quickly. And I'm really proud of it. Should I show this one? Has everyone seen this? Okay. Okay, this is this is a piece that came out of our commissioning group. We presented it at our festival last summer. And it's a very wonderful clown piece from Mexico and just give a little treat of the trailer here. Okay, so I wanted to just share, we're going to go back to, okay, that's the end of my presentation. So now we'll go to the Sonia Clark's presentation from Art Park. Wait, something's wrong with this sound. Hold on. This is not the sound that goes with this video. But you can pull up some chairs here if you want to. Okay, perfect. All right. So this is from Sonia whose theater is in Buffalo. Thank you so much for this opportunity. So our court is now celebrating its 50th anniversary. And we've had at least three major legal operations for both of them. But what it always wants is a public life in a place where art is limited and accessible and thin. We have four other territorial objectives. I think the focus belongs from the experience of celebration. The rating circuit straight away, our iPhone is primarily on that experience of a public celebration. Probably the last term, certainly, but the genuine sense of jewelry shared by thousands. I see the site as the ultimate playground where played inspired by their structure. We use this phone in 150 papers on the Maggie LeForge with a variety of fondly mannered spaces for parking lots and park clearance, almost stages to outboard theater and the outdoor space with an adjacent lawn. All present by perfect opportunity, not only the experience they're experiencing, excellence, but a chance to experience each other in an environment and most of them are kind of social, which have unsettled STEM joy. And certainly, we have all artists that are consumed to just go and play and with more than just a variety of different sources. We saw the picture actually from all the gals, so celebration that was created, artistic world demands by State Sherry and his friends, who did really well in making being asked for more similar celebrations. HMS Bell is all about how gals do be that way, well forward. In the past seven or so years, our part still nearly created a program that has included companies like Circle Ranch from Hamilton, Canada, Zora, Korea, and Estonia. Circle Barco's incorporation with acting compliance in Montreal was in Seattle, London, France, Port de la Valle is a combination of a circle and an out-round from Spain, Tanzinis from Ireland, but not the circle, Montreal, and big others. All of these have been presented in the context of larger public celebrations, or pre-existing outdoor festivals such as our bar carriages. Even when the tickets are sold for a specific show on occasion, put down in the lab at the City of Seattle launch house in the region of the parent of the music show, Barcar Collective, in the next year with the show by a machine playing thankfully. Ultimately, their third show was actually able to stand on its own and sold upwards of 3,000 tickets. The outdoor circuit street theater both fit perfectly into our arts, design, culture, and landscape. The combination of artistic excellence showcased by the highly specialized and capable certain performers who open the beers out of the smoke with their extraordinary overall beyond what would be possible, may be the formal outer setting, but the audience make a lot of sense for our department, not thousands. The other public spectacle is not so much an arch and the representation of life itself in the fight with war. That's where the street theater was used to make a deal for the Valle culture present. I find this art particularly very relevant to our work. The ultimate benefit of bringing outdoor shirts to art parks is to motivate the open minds in giving our audiences the permission to explore the new and the new, but ultimately very satisfying and ultimately leading to the love of many other cultures. It's an open door to open invitation. This is what that value comes from. I'd like to conclude the opening of station 1 art park and CERC and outdoor theater and art park. If I can be of any help, please reach out to artpark.net and thank you Roots and enjoy this evening. Hopefully I'll see you around and then planning our mutual seasons in the future. One thing this says that, you know, Sonia is just doing this because she believes in it and you know, it's not coming. Nothing's received. She hasn't inherited it. She has really, it's been real trailblazing work. Oops. Okay, now we have a contribution from Elena Sianco of PS21. I'm a senior curator for hosting this panel as well as many wonderful events you have done in the past and of course to how around for disseminating this information. I'm Elena Sianco, executive and artistic director of PS21, the Center for Contemporary Performance in the Hudson Valley that you see on this image. We have been presenting, we are here at the usual and have been presenting circus in the last three, four years with the first presentation of two international productions in 2021, one Cirque Liberté War in December and then another one in the summer, unstarving by Le Thon and Che from France, a production that we shared with the whole Montreal and it was originated by the Rose Wakeland. I should mention here to all of my colleagues how much we benefited from me and our participation and also of course the generosity of both and also building the community for contemporary service in the United States. While I speak I will be sharing with you images of our campus as well as some of the productions that we presented. A contemporary service came as a random thing in our dramatic agenda. It very much was part of what we devised as our pathways initiative and initiatives that we launched during the pandemic here in 2020 which is a series of spectacle participatory immersive events, international programs in our trails, but also in the parks, in parking lots, in libraries, in schools. Back in 2020 it was conceived as a series of programs that resided at the intersection of nature and the arts presenting science-specific performances and also embedded the responses to our landscape. The creation of pathways is probably the proudest achievement of our, we are new four-year, three-year programming history, but it's probably one of the proudest achievements of our team to bring beyond our grounds visionary international artists directly to the region and to communities throughout our region with programming that I already mentioned that are also offered a free of charge for our communities or at a very low cost. And this is where contemporary service comes in. For us pathways and contemporary service pathos to each other, to ourselves, to our bodies, it's a lingering of also a platform of our collaborations with other local and regional organizations. It's very much the initiative that is a counterweight that as we have seen it, so the prohibitive and restrictive cost prohibitive and restrictive participation in the arts and this region has some value but also in cultures and I think quite much throughout the country. And so in this spirit, new sectors that we have been presenting built upon our mission to increase participation in the cultural commons and also cultural and artistic resources in this area in the Berkshires and Columbia counties. I'm scrolling through and showing you an image of Galmey by Galmey, the wonderful production that you also shared with several other presenters in 2022. So our primary goal of presenting contemporary service several years ago was to expand access to culture and expression and also to privilege public assembly and combat injustices inherent in social economic exclusion. Our aim also was to include, was to forge cross sector alliances and also organizational alliances with many local organizations when we could co-conceit or program different ideas, masterclasses, workshops, collaborations and make sure that everybody, those who don't own certain homes, but actually everybody would participate in different kinds of communities. So in the course of our contemporary service presentations we realized that this art form, still new in the United States, was ideally suited to a major audience of all ages and backgrounds and also to unify different communities that we serve. Please point you one, thankfully, of 100 acres of land that also has artist housing on site is uniquely suited for this kind of collaborations where 21 communities and also our community orientation don't tail perfectly with the inclusive principles of contemporary service, a positioning after much as an essential incubator and host of this consequential new artistic art form in this country. And we felt that this is an art form by our moment because it addresses the quantity of some of the most successful productions that address urgent issues such as sustainability, diversity, solidarity, resilience. I am here as crawling through images on this production of Runners by Sifle. I think I've heard from the Czech Republic, that Viko Presents is a storybook, came to BS 21 and we were the only presenter in the United States and most companies that we bring do not come as a for a one-off presentation of several performances. They stay with us for a week on campus, they engage in conversations, they give masterclasses not just and we really feel that making those performances accessible or free and often held off-site in partnership with other organisations, comprising international as well as local resources, was our way to defend public space accessible to all. And some of those performances like this one, Branshe from Barcode Acting for Climate Montreal, highlight our equal responsibility in reimagining our relationship with nature. Circus is a platform democratises participation in the cultural comments and in this genifying area it is as important as ever. I am jumping to the image of Hanema from France. Premier of Hanema in North American premier that we have presented last August and September. It's an immersive multimedia inspiration of photography, large-scale moving image projections and live aerial performance. You see a visual, you see a visual suspended acrobat. The piece was created by a theater director from Dijon and the aerial performance was created by a pretty well-known suspension artist, Chloe Molier. If you are in the position to present this I highly recommend it. So it's a wonderful production addressing with this eugenistic installations and videos of natural landscapes that weaves the visual elements of photography, music, large-scale moving projections and also acrobatics which is the reflection of our time and inspired by studies in valley of climatology. I will finish my presentation with our images from Amokanama, nine acrobatics from Gina and Treville to PS21 and this is an image after the show, one of the workshops was kids. The production itself called the Park. We presented at Crellin Park of the town of Chatham and the Crellin Park bonus was PS91 roguety. This production drew 800 spectators. It was presented free of charge and this wonderful company stayed with us for a week, given workshops for kids and drumming, soccer even and this is a workshop for grown-ups, the dancers who the company gave at PS21. I am coming back to saying Nosweikler and Toku and Mik at that time because Amokanama and we were the only presenter in North America who brought artists from Gina and Las Vegas. Amokanama wasn't the age at the state of inception in 2020 when we took part online and made and this is how we discovered this company. It took almost four years for us to conclude this journey for this incredible artist, very great artists to bring them to the United States. So I encourage everybody who is interested in contemporary service to check out this company and also of course it's an open invitation to visit us and next summer and I'm very grateful for all of the work that Rose has been doing to create this community and thanks very much. Okay, I want to jump, let's see, this is a very, this is a whole different thing, it's her show so I think I'm going to skip this for now because we're a little over time so just I'm going to skip right through. Okay, Laurie, now we are here in person. So okay, so Laurie I'm so pleased you could be here, take it away. Thank you Ruth. So just to give a little context, I'm the director of programming and audience development at the Quick Center for the Arts. It's nice to see and it is located in Fairfield, Connecticut which is an easy 90ish minute train ride from Grand Central and we are at Fairfield University which is a modern Jesuit Catholic university so you know sort of a mid-sized scale and the Quick Center has been around for about 35 years now and I think what's interesting is over that time I think like any presenter there's been a lot of evolution of what the community has needed and what the Quick Center is able to provide and who we serve and so certainly when I moved up to Connecticut to take this job about 10 years ago what was really interesting to me and I think is helpful in context is that Fairfield University sits in the town of Fairfield which is clearly a suburban commuter community but hugged up against that is Bridgeport, Connecticut which is the largest city in our state and the most socioeconomically diverse and so the reality is the way we are serving our community is much broader than I think the stereotype that maybe was existing for a long time and so in that and in the presentations that we were considering we take a lot of pride in believing that we present the highest caliber of music and dance and theater that you can experience in Fairfield County and and in that we really realized that we were we were missing a piece of that puzzle and so Circus definitely became part of that conversation some of that stemmed from the fact that as I got to know the community that I was living in being in Bridgeport the PT Barna Museum is two miles from my front door and it helped me to understand because I I didn't grow up with Circus the way I think a lot of Americans might have experienced it um our you know I grew up in North Carolina and I'm sure it came through town but it was not something my parents took us to they love taking us to classical music and chamber concerts and things was very different so um having missed that although I knew the Barnum name I didn't really understand the history and so in connecting with the executive director and I said you know I really want to start thinking about Circus is this going to conflict with the history that exists here what was exciting is that and I I give her a lot of credit too is that Kathy was like no this is what Barnum would want like he would want the evolution of the art form and you know he was an inventor and and you know in those ways I think we realized we could be a continuation of the history but also moving forward and so in that we've been presenting Circus now for about six or seven years and each year we go we go from one presentation we're up to two presentations is taking up more of our season which is exciting especially considering the times and the challenges that we face but what's also really exciting for us is how we've been able to connect Circus artists with our broader community and so an artist I'm going to speak about more so is a gotten Adrian maybe makes sense to show the video and then I can jump in more you so what I'll share is I was really lucky to first be invited to the international market place in 2019 I haven't been sitting next to Ruth at a dinner and got the invitation was very excited bright place right time and in that each year since I've been able to attend the marketplace and learn about Circus in a way I don't think I ever could otherwise and even during that time in COVID the fact that there was still that access and still that learning was really really useful for me and so in that we actually got the opportunity to I saw the pitch session that I got Adrian did at in the 2022 marketplace and the moment I saw it I just knew it was work that it wasn't completed yet it was just the pitch really but I was like this is work that needs to be in our space and what was unique about it was that it wasn't sort of the stereotype of the work that we had started to become more known for which is the bigger companies that kind of fill the stage and far more they're a little more you know like the surprise and pal action that that people start to expect and what was so beautiful about it is that it's work that really starts to dive into you know what it means to be a pair and a gendered pair and that lifting and sharing and suddenly it was a conversation of work that we could present that actually aligned a little bit more with all of the other work we do as by being at a Jesuit institution we talk a lot about social justice driven work and suddenly it gave that space to connect the work curricularly with what we were doing too it wasn't just about the art it started to be a lot of other conversations and in that too I think what's important is that suddenly it helped to shift also the way we work with our broader community so for example you know we ended up having the artist the duo with us for about three or four days and in that time we had them we have a special partnership with the Bridgeport public school system and we actually had them have permission to do workshops with young men who are part of the detention center in Bridgeport so and unfortunately I can't you can't take any photos or video or else I would share it but to see a group of young men who are going through a life experience I could never imagine and to be very dubious at first and then to suddenly see Adrienne climb up on a got shoulders and walk towards them and their eyes just sort of exploded and suddenly they were on their feet and they were ready to do things and that to me was really transformational and we were working with that partnership with other artists too but that was the most I'd ever seen those students really sort of explode into the space and went more and and then in addition what we found at a university campus is often I think there's a lot of assumptions that student athletes don't really want to engage in the arts I think that's a missed opportunity I think there's plenty who do but the other thing we found is that when we make the call to the athletics program and say oh we have these circus artists this is their specialty these are the things they're going to share every team is eager to sign up whether it's men's teams women's teams so they worked back in October with the women's field hockey team who are champions and they took time out of a very busy schedule to take to do that workshop and we're totally by the end like the coach was being lifted in the air and they were stacking each other and you could see the determination because it actually was really challenging for them they were exhausted and they couldn't believe how what what the requirements were of the body but also to see the trade of weight and sharing that happens especially in a male and female body and the assumptions that take place with that so for us it's it's been really exciting to work with artists like this because I think they share so much of themselves but I also think they touch parts of our community that we might otherwise not really be able to to dive into and so we're really trying to take that to continue to expand how we're serving that's me um thank you blurry that's amazing um so now we're gonna hear from Jed and um Jed has been working with Circus for a number of years now um when this moment in the pandemic happened where we created our working groups um one of the working groups that I I asked Jed to co-lead a working group on commissioning and um the practice of commissioning is something that's very common for circus in certain countries and this is not one of them and um but you know Jed is has been a leading commissioner of contemporary forming arts in other disciplines and so I asked Jed to team up with someone in Berlin who has done this in what can be conceived of as being commissioning work with chameleon theater in Berlin um for many years it's kind of their business model and that together they have helmed this group which he will talk about so it's it's uh been really exciting that you've been able to bring your knowledge and commitment to supporting artists creation in a profound way to this art form take it away thank you very much Ruth it's a delightful introduction thank you Frank and you're right I'm not going to use notes because because Laurie yeah Laurie serendipitously inexplicably but intuitively gave me a line into this with Agat and Adrienne because I think one of the most important things that I've encountered in the past four or five years in my history with circus um goes back to um about 68 years ago when I went to the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus and I discovered theater through circus that's really where I let me know when you want me to start with I'm on you don't worry you know and then you know and then consequently I found myself working with a um in 1986 with a um a circus company uh Jean-Baptiste Thierry and Victoria Chaplin um and the Cirque Imaginaire which I brought to the United States in 1986 and then there was kind of a lapse in time and so forth um but through Ruth and through Tohu and others I discovered that circus today is as fresh creative expression as I've encountered in 40 years um and I'm not going to place myself in the context of dance music and theater and opera history because I think that would be very boring but I do want to say that what what you showed um that duet um emphasizes what I think is singularly important about the direction that circus is going and and I think circus is on an upward trajectory I don't believe I I know we know the history we got that but the profound beauty of circus today is that it doesn't know where it's going it's going to discover and discovering circus is is what audiences love so if you want to know what the audience is is going to find don't give them anything they already know give them something they don't know and the duet that we just saw um really will allow me to talk about the company that I came from and I think it's not going to be academic but see the transition from the circus that I saw 68 years ago to the circus that I know today is the use of metaphor and story and I think it's going to be very interesting because I think it's going to be very interesting because I think it's going to be 68 years ago to the circus that I know today is the use of metaphor and story that's not about spectacle it's about the means that get us to that moment that we associate with circus which is wow except it's not the spectacle it's the internal emotional evolution of using the vocabulary of circus of the circus arts that we all we all know because we grew up with it this is not this is not a language we don't know this is a language we adore you know and those two sweep me off my feet every time I see that even in this video I'm captured captured because there's a truth in the physical work that they do they find it's not about I mean yes of course the little one supports the big one I mean we got all this that's cool but there's a way they approach it that is so human they're not trying to tell you I'm amazing it's their heart that's amazing that's what they're doing I love these these two and why didn't I know you were doing them what's wrong with your marketing department that's me too it's amazing anyway so yes I'm part of this this fantasy group called the utopians which basically Ruth started I just you know like you all know the metaphor of the story of running off and joining the circus well I couldn't do that I was too old and not necessarily in good shape at that time I've been practicing and I worked myself up into kind of a physical self but so I joined the Ruth circus and I went off to Montreal and began seeing artists that were using doing things that I had never experienced before in terms of circus and one of them was a woman named Holly Treadenick and Holly is based in Wedlin Ontario and yes you can start and what Holly's created is a deeply personal story about a relationship with her father I know okay but the issue here which you will see in these pictures is that her father was a firefighter and she's an aerialist she's an acrobat and she started telling her father's stories the stories that he told her after his rescues after his life as a first responder he came home and told her these stories and you can begin spinning in your mind the relationship that evolved between a man who rescues and risks these are familiar terms are they not for circus you know to save people to save lives and how that influenced Holly Treadenick who became an expert aerialist an acrobat and so she tells her story through you'll see using the materials that are familiar to firefighters but they're oddly as you consider it these are the same types of tools that we see in circus and so I found that it's very emotional experience that she has made available to audiences called in the fire and this little cohort that we put together called the utopians dreamed up this idea that we would be commissioning and supporting new work because we really wanted to validate new ideas really as a group and they're about what 10 or 12 of us 16 and we had this brilliant leader there another one we have two billion leaders really got this one and then we have anchor poets from chameleon in Berlin and we led a whole group including monica monica martins was part of it I mean it was quite a group of yakus and we came up with three groups three artists to commission and one of them was holly and what holly dreamed but holly imagined was that when her stories started coming into life on stage there would be a chorus and that we would and that she wanted to commission one of me as it turns out to commission an eight person singing group to join her in her telling the fantastical father's stories so that's what the utopians ended up doing um and it turns out that her father started the winnipeg firefighters association and museum and in the united states in hudson new york is the volunteer firefighters museum and association and hudson hall which is based in hudson has invited her to come and perform there um and so the communication is not is on different levels of how human beings relate to each other how audiences relate to each other and um I can't and I believe sonia who we saw previously is also part of that so because she had and this is the connection apparently she had a very sad fire in her theater um which caused um tremendous anguish and she wants to celebrate the firefighters who helped save her space if I got the story correctly but this is this is the level at which I think theater theater circus is operating on now it's not it's not just bring in the clouds um which is a whole other aspect of it we love clouds we all love clouds don't get me started about the um please this is it's a whole conversation about the misuse of terms it just gives ourselves into trouble me in particular um so anyway I just want to congratulate the circus folks that are here you onto something you really onto something thank you thank you Ruth can I stay oh absolutely but also I'm going to introduce you um so we um are so lucky this weekend in New York City to have not only this fine panel but also um a circus from Cambodia is here at the new victory and this is years in the making and it's extremely exciting and before they came here they were in Montreal uh at Tohu which was the first time Tohu had ever programmed a company from Asia so I'm really proud of that I did that and um and uh so really because the companies here were really excited to have both Lindsay from the new victory and also Xavier from the company to sort of talk about two two angles on the same project of building audiences for contemporary circus with uh far circus and white gold as the as the object and by the way then another company that is making a landmark return is a clown company from Madagascar is going to be at the Lincoln Center this weekend as well so it turns out to be quite a consequential consequential weekend for circus um so Lindsay has uh done wonderful work collaborating we've collaborated before and she's quite a genius around the um art of of engagement of young people and families around any art form but particularly circus and I'm so excited for her to share her knowledge with you let's see go for it thank you okay um the I do want to click would teach me how that one I'll do it let's try it a thing happened okay so the first thing to know is that first and foremost I am a fan of circus I'm not an expert in circus I'm a fan I'm an I am the audience you built okay so that is my son and I that's what I'm going to stand up um this is one of his first circuses his actual first circus is airplay acrobufos yeah totally but this is maybe his second circus he's about four or five um and we go to a ton of it but the other new audience in this picture is me because the first time I ever saw a circus was sitting in the new victory seat about a month after I got hired it was circle was a show called rain and I bowled because to the point that we've been talking about here I had no idea that that's what circus could be and if I think about it now I actually still get a little choked up because I hadn't watched it I'd only seen it as reference as a cultural reference an American cultural reference but I hadn't gone my parents didn't bring me so when we talk about building new audiences I think the thing to invite into this room is that I spend a lot of time thinking about how to invite young people as new audiences but it is also important for me to think that their parents and the grown-ups who are coming with them are also often new audiences just like I was all right that's us we do a lot at the new victory we don't just do circus um we do a lot of everything from everywhere it's fun you should come and we're on 42nd street um but nope point it right there we go um but the thing that we realized is that we did some number crunching we do about three sometimes more circuses each year we were opened in 1995 and we realized we've done more than three quarters of a million audiences into circus in New York since that time I know it's so fun we've never done the math um but now we've done the math so that's the kind of circus um impact that we're having in New York City right now and also I've been there since 2004 so we're talking about lots and lots and lots of young people and their families walking through the door to see really amazing circuses that Mary Rose Lloyd who is our artistic director who cannot be here today um has brought in from everywhere Cambodia which we'll talk a lot more about is our first time our first company from Cambodia but also Ethiopia and France and Asia um lots of places but the thing that's pedal punk um why can't I do it you're gonna do it the thing that we wanted to spend just a little bit of time talking about is what is happening for the audience who is new in these seats um and so that's going to be sort of the the main point is like for me to talk about what does the new victory do to prepare an audience to come in to receive this work and not because the work cannot stand on its own but because we actually know from research that if you help an audience engage and meet the content before they sit in the seat they will then self-report a greater impact of that work after having seen it so we think of it as like what is the red carpet that we can lead up into the work to make sure that the audience sitting in it is going to have received the most impact they possibly can and then we're going to talk about what the impact actually looks like because we have some I call them maps can we do the next one isn't she great she's so fun okay so one of the things we do is it's really important um for new audiences to get to meet the content the art form the themes prior so that for us means that we are inviting our families to come as part of family workshops to learn how to do the most bare minimum you have some beautiful pictures of kids on actual performers backs that kind of invitation um into the work and into the themes is really really key we do that both in person in schools um but we also do it in our lobby so there's a teaching artist before every single show to try to create that red carpet into the experience and we do it more and more online next one I don't know if we need to watch these we can but we started doing arts breaks during the pandemic this is Brenda Angel from I know from Argentina um they were supposed to come on our COVID season and they sure didn't but we wanted them to um and then so this is an example of sort of how we were able to invite our audiences in to see sort of behind the scenes of this work and then a little bit about how we actually use our teaching artists right now as well but I think we should skip it you can go online and google new victory arts break and you will find all these things um but here's where I want to do it is we actually spent five years researching all of our programming with young people and there was some and they saw the kids that we researched with did saw a lot of circus because we program a lot of circus um and here's some of the things we learned we look so the first is that we call these little maps emotion maps um every show that they would come to they the kids would then basically tell us the kind of emotions that they experienced in their seat while they were watching and we are not saying that those happy emotions are good and that the sad emotions are bad that's not what we're saying but it is really interesting that as we looked at the emotion maps that the young people were giving us after watching a circus that we were seeing them very high up on the sort of excited thrilled calm peaceful happy and joyful for me this is not because the other emotions are to be avoided but it is interesting that I think that the absence of words in a lot of the pieces that we were doing actually creates this larger emotional map than what we were sometimes seeing with our more straight plays which were seeing smaller maps so how much the this map is over um is somewhat unique to circus is what we were seeing can you go to the next one and then this one this one's also really fun so live performance can do a lot of things here's what circus we were seeing over and over again that circus was doing that was somewhat specific to the art form and the first is that right here social bridging social bridging refers to the fact that you can go and see a performance and you can feel closer to the person that you went with but also closer to the people that you're viewing with even if you didn't come with them even if they're not your partner we were seeing that that circus over and over and over again people were identifying that they felt closer to the rest of the audience and to the people that they came with then we were seeing tracking for other kinds of performances and then the other one is over here motivation action kids are sitting in the seats and then they were like i want to do that i so want to do that the fact that these two things are as far out as they are is somewhat unique to this particular art form we weren't seeing this when we're looking at some of the straight plays even some of the puppetry work um we weren't seeing that that over and over again the art form itself was inviting people to connect and was inviting people to do um and so i wanted to sort of share that back with people who are interested in the circus about what's actually happening in your audiences but i also want to connect it to wolf brown actually has done recent research post covid about what audiences are coming to and what they're why they're coming to things now and it's really interesting because the circus maps that we're seeing behind us match up almost exactly to what wolf brown is saying that now audiences are saying they want they want to feel connected they want to feel emotion they want to feel excited and those things are mapping up at almost exactly about what the information we have about what's happening and now i want to bring it back to white gold which is here right now so we um you saw my son in the beginning oh back at four so now he's almost 11 and he sat next to me last weekend watching white gold and one of the things that i noticed um is and then i'm gonna turn it over to you to talk a lot more about it but um two things were happening for us in the audience one is that my son and i leaned toward each other so while we were watching his shoulder started to brush mine it's small but for an 11 year old boy sitting next to his mother i'm going to tell you this is not like a regular thing that's happening for me anymore but it did happen while we were watching white gold and our breath started to synchronize we started to breathe kind of the same like especially at moments that were really exciting or really beautiful or where there was a motion that rose that experience that i have with my own kid is i think one of the most sort of like beautiful things that the audiences especially new audiences who don't know that this is what circus is now um it's a gift that they're receiving um and as we left i will also tell you that he asked for circus classes for his holiday gift which i have yet to figure out how to make happen um but that kind of that invitation to both of us to have this experience and to watch this beautiful work um is a gift that you've given me as an audience member and as i began i am first and foremost an audience of circus i'm your biggest biggest fan and i wanted to turn it over to you to talk more about like the rest of white gold and then if there are questions about how we're holding around it we certainly can oh so i'm going to stand as well i think it's cool to stand uh so i'm my name is xavier govin i'm a i'm a producer with far circus this company i've been living in cambodia for eight years so i know this project more particularly i speak the language i spend a lot of time over there but i my my focus is um social impact circuses social impact companies uh so far is of course my my main partner but i also work now with zip zapp circus in south africa which is a beautiful project as well and like far it's 30 years old already and they are at this point of their development where they want a tour abroad uh as well so that's one part of what i want to develop is how do we uh how do we um start with an ngo with a local social project a project that wants to give joy to the children that want them to blossom that want them to gulf to gain self-confidence how you start from that and you uh have the ambition to uh to reach international stages that's a really beautiful thing that we are achieving now with white gold and thank you so much Ruth for trusting us and inviting us in mick at the very first place and thanks victor new victory you've you've been trusting us a lot and you've been helping us improve right away when we arrived in new york very concretely and i'm very grateful for that so far is a is a social project at first as i said and it started in cambodia can you yeah you can go on um it started in the 80s actually in the side two refugee camp uh you know there was a terrible genocide in cambodia 75 to 79 and after that there was also a civil war going on for all the 80s and there was those refugee camps with hundreds of thousands of refugees living in terrible uh conditions and uh a french humanitarian her name was veronique the crop she decided to teach art classes visual art classes painting drawing so uh she wanted the kids to heal their wounds and to overcome their traumas because they had a terrible terrible terrible daily life of course there was bombing there was violence in the camps there were rapes etc so you can go on Ruth in 1986 she started those classes you can go on uh in those those kind of refugee camps you can imagine uh what was the daily life that's veronique and then you can go on Ruth you want me to click maybe it'll be easier it's okay then in 1994 the the borders reopened and nine of her students they decided to continue the adventures they they had they knew how to draw they knew how to paint but they said it's it's it's it's something beautiful to give to the children that gonna go back to their country some of them they didn't know anything about the country they were born uh in in thailand um i'm gonna skip 30 years of history of far because i know i can't be too long and this is far nowadays so uh you as you see it's extremely diverse you have uh theater classes dance classes uh you have uh circus of course you have music you have painting and drawing still sculpture animation etc etc so 1000 students today 500 artistic students 150 professional artists that was a big a major development in 2013 we were able to open a big top near to the temple of anko the temples of anko you have many and that's that's the place where you have four million tourists every year so that was a place where we could imagine making income thanks to a daily show and that's what happens now we have a daily show we have several productions uh in this in this big top uh alternating rotating for 150 artists to to to earn their revenue and then 70 of the benefits we make from that circus tent goes go back to the to the NGO so running costs of the NGO are partially covered uh by the work of the beneficiaries themselves you can go on route and so what brings us back to the to the theme of the conference when the last development was how do we reach out to international audiences and so uh we we decided we thought a lot about it and we were like how how are how are we going to make a difference with the international circumstances i mean there's no comparison we don't have the same means we don't have the same schools there's no way they're going to reach the same level of execution let's let's face it and we decided to stick to our identity which which is social so we decided to talk about uh issues of Cambodia nowadays and i i think uh that's what makes the audience kind of attracted we talk about Cambodia but Cambodia of today and in white gold for example uh it's the confrontation between Buddhism tradition and consumerism nowadays in Cambodia it's very it's it's a very concrete issue and i think we feel it when we see the show so we're telling a story we're not we have some tricks we have some stunts and i think the kids are really loving them of course but we're also telling a very concrete story and and i think we get very emotional seeing the show and that's because we incorporate some elements that are very local in the music we mix traditional instruments of Cambodia and tin cans because it's a country where you do a lot where you see a lot of recuperation from trash you know it's a mix of all that uh we have rice which figures money which figures greed which figures conflict because of the work and the workers being totally denied and totally despised and we have visual art as well we have those wonderful painters that come out of the association as well and the paintings are here to tell to give a path to the to the main characters and really to deliver a buddhist message and so that's what i think helped us to stand out of other productions and that it's a it's a it's a project that tours since 2019 and for the first time in north america thanks again for the for the invitation you can go on Ruth those are some pictures as you see our painter traditional dancer of Cambodia the Apsara dance and then one of the stunts that maybe your son was was maybe feared by the next thing an image of white gold the rice balls with the capitalist character um so yeah to conclude i think our our yeah our goal to target new audiences on our side was really to talk about the identity of the country and really not being ashamed of the social project that we have we we are at the at the very roots of the association i got goosebumps this morning when there was a deaf and mute artist which is in our show is is an artist since since he's 10 years old really is deaf and mute but he really is capable of doing everything is an amazing clown an amazing dancer an amazing acrobat and there was this this audience of deaf and mute children and i was like wow so that's thanks of the job thanks to the job of new victory of course because i've never seen that in europe i've never seen a theater bringing so much so much deaf and mute children and i mean the role model that they have on stage seeing these artists doing all those stuff and then the conversation the talk back that we had after and then signing and and conversating and i was amazed that the language was the same as well that the the language the yeah so that was really beautiful and that's thanks to the preparation work that you were talking before so i think it really reaches it's a complete experience and thanks to new victory it's it really goes back to the to the roots of our of our social work over there in Cambodia thanks so much thank you um yeah maybe we just finish with that so the the um i would just say that in the first slide when i gave the context i mentioned that um uh there has been a brain a talent drain towards the elite training schools from countries that don't support uh don't have government support for the create new creation in circus um and that is and the companies that are staying and making work in those countries are making work that is um culturally specific and it's really rich and very important and so i think what you're saying is really important to say that um when artists look back on the richness of their own cultural heritage that's where they find something that is does speak to audiences around the world and um it's when they try to be universal that the inequality of between different countries in terms of access to elite athletic training and that kind of thing really comes out so it's kind of like um i think it's in the richness of the cultural specificity that we have more of a global um offer of work that circulates because of what people have to say and express and not just the question of can you do it better than this other person who couldn't access you know there's a really inequality globally around who can access elite athletic training and who can't so um okay so yeah do you want do you want to say anything just something to add on to that um because um white gold is getting standing ovations at the new victory right now which is not actually all that rare i mean it's not all that common at the new victory kids don't necessarily know to stand when they appreciate something and to your point i actually think it's because of the emotion um that they are experiencing the feats are amazing to watch but i think that the standing ovations are actually coming because to all of your points the vulnerability and the emotional impact of the story and of the performers is impacting them in a different way than if they were just simply seeing the most technical like the most technical is amazing but it doesn't necessarily always make you stand on your feet i have the impression i don't know exactly but i have the impression uh is the the first day i stepped in far in back in 2008 i was completely amazed by the the urge they had to to express themselves artistically and i feel even though now they are professional artists since many i feel they still have that i feel there's something about if they were not doing this there would be trash pickers you know and and i i there's something very very strong that i feel every time i watch far and it's been 15 years um tomik can you help can you put us on to the slide that says monique it's the fourth or fifth very yeah um i want to just close with the last video that we hadn't shown very atomic very beginning number five or six um monique martin is has been a presenter of circus and um was part of the center education cohort that i mentioned earlier um when she was at summer stage and in recently has decided that she's going to make a circus and is is in the process of creation um and so she's you know she does she is american she's based here in new york and she is also has this long-term exposure to a lot of the work that we're talking about so i just want to share with you a little teaser that she has of her work in progress that she she was meant to be here with us but is in um abhijan at the moment liberation spaces oasis spaces and joy spaces for black and brown bodies have found sovereignty we celebrate the power of one thing as a healing of chemical transforming force of reaching of form the joy and an invitation to talk in to your imagination um so she sends her greetings okay um we have very little time um we also have amazing artists and the audience that could have easily been up here so i want to um maybe i can ask um just is there would you guys like to add anything to what has been said from your perspective or um maybe yeah you can ask a question too oh hi i'm on camera hi i'm mark lonergan um i'd love to ask a question and this is not the most artistic question but it's a question that i i'm currently obsessed with and i was asking xavier bethis earlier at this time not just in new york city but throughout the united states we read story after story as one of you refer to theaters that are closing that are yeah you said closing or reducing their seasons or laying people off it's doom and gloom if you open the new york times art section or american theater or any of these places just constantly bombarded however every circus performance that i've either done with my company or that i have seen since the pandemic has been packed so i would love if any one of you have a thought about this as to why this might be happening is this happening am i imagining this is happening i'm just curious about this like is circus the great exception that you're saying i mean i can say it's not for us unfortunately i mean it's it's you know the audience that's excited to see it is there but it's not suddenly selling more so than before or more than other art forms that we present um but we're also still early in that relationship so had we had a deeper relationship prior to that i wonder if that would have been different but i think those who do come are very enthusiastic and often surprised by what they're experiencing even if they knew they were coming to see circus they still seem to have sort of this elation of um how incredible it really was and i for some reason i think sometimes we walk in with a more negative attitude than we realize we have and that that the art form actually sort of takes over so but that's for us Lindsay do you want to you had said it's doing this particular show is doing well but this show is doing well um i would say i mean i think that the fact of audience behavior right now doesn't is not that circus is the sole exception of the audience behavior but i would say i think that when we hear what audiences are hoping to experience when they go that it is a very good match for what circus can offer and that would hopefully mean that more and more people will present and produce circus since it seems to be a very good match for what it is people are hoping for in a performing arts experience well i don't know how from which point of view were from which angle i can talk because i'm not i i'm not a presenter i come from the ballet world i was a ballet dancer i was telling you before and to me i'm very glad that i'm now involved with circus i find it more popular i find it less elitist and i i stopped being a ballet dancer because i thought it was too narrow minded this speaks to every audience and there's this thrill of the stunts that is still here and i think we shouldn't we shouldn't leave that even if we go into more contemporary forms and we tell stories and it's more theatrical and there's music or paintings and eventually involved and everything i should i think we shouldn't we shouldn't lose the like tension of the skill of the of the trick i think that's really really appealing so um i love this art form obviously and i'm i'm glad it or it's also a great tool for for kids to blossom and that's the that's the very root of the project i accompany and and that's immediate and kids enjoy right away and they can they can do amazing things after two years of practice which is not the case with classical music or ballet let's face it i think it's for all those reasons it's a great art form most probably also circus reacts with space activates a space i think it creates an experience for that very moment it happens in a space in a much perhaps stronger level inside the theater but also outside so i think it's all about relations it's all about movement and it's all about experiencing and as you said emotions and i think circus is just very very good at activating that i mean i'm gonna i'm gonna respond to your question as a consumer okay affordability um ticket prices for circus are less than the ticket prices for dance theater opera and that's a major factor and that's a warning that should go out leave it at that i'm christina gelstone uh i'm not home for any more than two weeks for the next year because i'm constantly on tour i just came from saudi arabia i'm about to go to chile and my heart is pumping in my chest because i'm leaving the field uh because you mean when you speak on the stage of this panel you talk about how beautiful contemporary circus can be and as an american artist i feel a strong whiplash for a moment jed you've made a joke about clowns and i am a clown i'm a very successful clown when i'm in the u.s i'm treated and i've been told by programmers to my face that i'm great for preschoolers and when i was at the adelaide festival the second largest festival in the world outside of edinburgh i was considered a major artist and i was pushing forward the field of clowning and i was treated with incredible respect part of that whiplash of being an american is not being monetarily supported there's a lot of talk about diversity and supporting diversity and i am an artist that was able to make enough of a career to be able to invest in my own show to the tune of 150 000 dollars eight years ago we still have not made that money back and i have had one of the most successful mind-bending careers that anyone could imagine sold out tohu during their whole holiday run uh have been formed it performed in dream theaters the biggest theater in singapore the biggest they sold out scalping tickets for me in shanghai i was making a new show if you want diversity if you want new voices you're going to have to support them because i cannot knowing that it took me eight years of massive success not to make back the money that i invested in my own show that i don't have the funds knowing that i need i don't get a 401k i don't get insurance that the rest of you on the stage possibly have i've never made i'm always the least paid person in the room and when i make my shows i'm expected to make them for free that i invest my own time and i cannot continue in this field i don't feel supported in my own country i won't be performing airplay beyond our final performance in the u.s finishing off the theater that for support is the most in cleveland and so uh i'm sorry that i'm so shaky but i'm 50 years old in the u.s with the blash i'm treated and talked to is it from a very young artist who doesn't understand the economy is an oh you poor thing can't you just make another can't you just and i'm grateful for what my non-verbal theater has given me permission to do around the world and how connected i am to audiences and people are crying people are exploding people are standing on their feet no matter what language they speak i have value i know i do and i know that there are other american artists that also have value but they are not being treated or being given that value um usually i can speak about this with like more courage but you're seeing um you're seeing me at the end and i'm going to be in 10 countries next year and i'm going to continue having a beautiful beautiful career that i self-funded and i've seen commissions happen and i've seen commissions happen for international companies and i've always wondered why was i always the one for preschoolers in the states why wasn't i considered someone that was a great artist in my own country so this very same conversation that you guys saw that in 2009 there was a thing where they were like hey contemporary circus u.s tried out so that was what 14 years ago and the same conversation is happening again and it's still international artists coming in you guys i leave it to you thank you thank you so the question is on how does america support and um as you said earlier france canada others invest much much more um or maybe even in your context you know what what can be done better to support and let american artists create the work and you know the models first of all thank you for everything that you have done to advance this art form and from here if i somehow i hurt you i didn't mean to that wasn't i'm sorry i mean i have a whole spiel about how our culture that is the american culture demeans circus how that term is used in order that's the political activity is a circus that isn't a compliment you know and i think we should go back and look at language and and with the word clown is i mean the is the most respected art form i know because the what the clown does for me is an internal experience that becomes external let's leave it at that i do think we're in a lot of trouble in this country there is no category for circus in any in any philanthropy public or private it's always tucked in someplace else it's an afterthought and the circus is actually the first art form for me historic we even saw in a presentation we go back to egypt where does circus come from we don't and i'm gonna say this but some reservation we don't respect circus the way we respect dance or theater or opera or even performance it's a huge problem why why when are we going to grow up and understand the source of our intellect is circus really is but also you know in in the us there has been you know it's very difficult to maintain a company for any performing art form uh just because the structure you know favors the the temples of of non-profit you know armature and independent artists create the act of creation is unsupported um living as an artist unsupported so it it's not just only circus it's it's a broader issue that um is you know when presenters access work from abroad they are accessing work that has been completely supported throughout its entire creation life and the artists themselves are and um the theater that it brings them in benefits from that you know it's an unspoken so you're naming something you're not the only one i mean it's an endemic systemic issue here i mean i think there's just so many layers to it and we've i mean certainly talked about it and i've talked to mark i mean there's a few and i think it's interesting i mean for as somebody who's still learning a lot and understanding it for myself i think there's so many layers it's not just the lack of funding it's the understanding and advocacy of the institutions who do receive funding to also it shouldn't just be on the artist's back to advocate that circus as a check mark right it is up to institutions to ask of that too and you know for example i've made it sort of a mission that every time i present an artist in front of um new england presenters because we have a an event that happens every year that i present a circus artist if i'm if i'm chosen it's always circus um and that i always speak even if it's an international artist i always still also speak about american artists as part of my presentation even though i'm not supposed to but but in part because there are circus artists in our backyard that people don't even know about and so it's important like i think it's this much you know it is my responsibility to understand where i am in that framework and to continue to do that advocacy but i know for a lot of presenters they're like well we don't do circus go blah blah blah and then i'm like you're missing out and so part of it i'm realizing is like i'm just having to start from the very bottom and i can only imagine what that's like as the artist is like i've been doing this i'm seen in this way why is it not being and i think part of it the conversation is in some ways people i think in the u.s people see circus as entertainment and therefore it's somehow a lesser art form i really do and i think it's so missed and that somehow because it might be for families that it's somehow less and i'm like no actually children should be experiencing the highest quality of work right and so i think it's just so many layers of our society that are very messy and it's not a good answer but i think it is something we have to continually work at um because it is an incredibly missed opportunity to not be able to support the artists that are in our backyard but here at this panel we have many people who have really fought for this and continue to do so and um you know things are growing and developing i feel i do still feel optimistic um yeah maybe one more comment question anything maybe every one of you talk about your upcoming project doesn't have to be long what are you what's in the pipeline what are you baking what's new okay so on zip's upside we have a fantastic show that's going to start touring in europe uh it's called moya and it's about the resilience of a of a street kid uh in capetown and that's exactly what uh the kids in zip's up face uh zip's up there's an amazing outreach work even more than far i would say they go in the shanty towns of capetown which are huge and much more violent it's it's a totally another context but that's a beautiful creation and with far uh we we're gonna create a new show tackling the plastic pollution in southeast asia so also a very concrete theme uh because i don't know if you if you've traveled to southeast asia but that's it's a bit of a hell over there considering the plastic pollution so we're gonna address a message through that new creation like we do in all the other shows so the new victory for the rest of this season we're supporting white gold uh and then 360 all stars is coming back to us and then a circus called i'm possible uh which is an american circus uh that is full of performers who are also disabled in some way but is awesome and i'm really excited about how that's going to push the new victory around accessibility as well and then we'll keep doing it over and over and over again as much as we can what am i working on i'm i'm i'm in a position where i'm i'm an encourager i'm not actually working on anything specific but i do have the good fortune of living not too far from chatham new york ps 21 and i'm encouraging elena and ps 21 and other venues in the hudson valley to coalesce around a uh a circus festival that embraces not just the international but the national artists that we have that's what i'm up to i'm pushing i got one um uh the quick center will be presenting a company flip for breek this spring for the first time um but i think my work is most focused on um in the in the circus world i'm the co-facilitator for the u.s. presenters group and really trying to find ways to keep all of us connected to get more and more people at the table when we have our zoom calls and to make sure that we're talking about a lot of different kinds of circus both as education and in order to first all present the you know the most work possible and then continuing to try to find partners and ways to to just be excited and support the work what are you what am i doing well i am i'm consulting with tohu i'm not uh part of their staff anymore so but i'm continuing to fight the good fight and advocate through um various professional you run the market uh so the next mic market is next summer in july same so um yes i'm advising on it and for our viewers also is there a place a central place where people could find out what's happening in the circus world is their website is there um something american or global where where people just can look up there's a website called circus talk and it has a lot of articles um kind of anything that happens since tends to surface on circus talk dot com dot org dot com they're based here there is also the american circus alliance which offers a lot of different resources and information and it also notes all of the u.s touring artists so if you want to know who's out there it is on that resource i also share that at all the things i go to so let's see where we'll all be going and in the very beginning we refer to it to artists theater artists in the 70s and 80s how complicated it also was for them and um what a struggle um and how complicated it is and then it's time now to figure out for this country you know to support its artists and to create experiences for the people living for that short moment of planet earth then what's worthwhile to really you know spend your time and i do think it's theater's performance but also especially um circus so um thank you all for coming thank you for being with us ruth for also flying in and making this happen um at seven o'clock we have a short film but maybe you tell something about it um so the thing we're going to see at seven p.m. was directed by joel who's here hi joel thanks for coming and thanks so much for organizing this ruth so it's uh it's a it's a film called cirque du cambodia maybe it's better you talk about it joel because you have a much better english accent than i have hello and uh hopefully you all stick around to see the film it's as avie mentioned called cirque de cambodia so i travel i was living in Bangkok for 12 years and through my travels i ended up at far circus through an interesting set of circumstances if you see this film you'll see that for yourself but immediately immediately i felt the magic of far i mean it just it was like a lightning bolt that hit me when i saw it and i saw all the things that you're talking about and and the energy and you know that all the things you're saying i i i loved the circus as a kid um grew up here in the city and i went to madison square garden a couple blocks away to see the ringling brother show every year uh but i mean i i had the greatest associations um but it hadn't really been connected to the circus world but i was traveling through cambodia found out about this circus uh that was in this kind of rural village nothing else really around it but inside this makeshift kind of circus tent they put on the most beautiful show and it just as a filmmaker who had done short films i just knew that this was something i could really wrap my head around and spend a lot of time getting to know better and even though it was about six or seven hours from Bangkok where i was living i made the trip i don't know probably 20 times just to come back to film and uh and i don't want to give everything away but two of the students from far decided they wanted to become the first cambodians to take the stage with uh Cirque du Soleil so to me that seemed like a pretty amazing arc to follow and i stayed with these two characters for eight years through four countries so if you stick around and see the film you'll see what happens and if they make it or not uh but uh that's my story and that's the film yeah yeah so wonderful so it's really thank you all on the panel thank you here in the audience thanks to HowlRound thanks to Tomek up there and i do think um it is pointing the finger um to the future um this art form and these circus artists themselves of course are the moon the finger is pointing to but i think um it is as i've never blocked i think as as strong as a as a possibility that this will really um take root that the tree will also stand and live long so thank you